by Robert Kagan
The problem is not new. During the Cold War, American military predominance and Europe’s relative weakness produced important and sometimes serious disagreements over the U.S.-Soviet arms race and American interventions in the third world. Gaullism, Ostpolitik, and the various movements for European independence and unity were manifestations not only of a European desire for honor and freedom of action. They also reflected a European conviction that America’s approach to the Cold War was too confrontational, too militaristic, and too dangerous. After the very early years of the Cold War, when Churchill and others sometimes worried that the United States was too gentle in dealing with Stalin, it was usually the Americans who pushed for tougher forms of containment and the Europeans who resisted. The Europeans believed they knew better how to deal with the Soviets: through engagement and seduction, through commercial and political ties, through patience and forbearance. It was a legitimate view, shared at times by many Americans, especially during and after the Vietnam War, when American leaders believed they, too, were working from a position of weakness. But Europeans’ repeated dissent from the harder American approach to the Cold War reflected Europe’s fundamental and enduring weakness relative to the United States: Europe simply had fewer military options at its disposal, and it was more vulnerable to a powerful Soviet Union. The European approach may have reflected, too, Europe’s memory of continental war. Americans, when they were not themselves engaged in the subtleties of détente, viewed the European approach as a new form of appeasement, a return to the fearful mentality of the 1930s. Europeans viewed it as a policy of sophistication, as a possible escape from what they regarded as Washington’s excessively confrontational approach to the Cold War.
During the Cold War, however, these were more tactical than philosophical disagreements. They were not arguments about the purposes of power, since both sides of the Atlantic clearly relied on their pooled military power to deter any possible Soviet attack, no matter how remote the chances of such an attack might seem. The end of the Cold War, which both widened the power gap and removed the common Soviet enemy, not only exacerbated the difference in strategic perspectives but also changed the nature of the argument.
For much of the 1990s, nostalgic policymakers and analysts on both sides of the Atlantic insisted that Americans and Europeans mostly agreed on the nature of these threats to peace and world order; where they disagreed was on the question of how to respond. This sunny analysis overlooked the growing divide. More and more over the past decade, the United States and its European allies have had rather substantial disagreements over what constitute intolerable threats to international security and the world order, as the case of Iraq has abundantly shown. And these disagreements reflect, above all, the disparity of power.
One of the biggest transatlantic disagreements since the end of the Cold War has been over which “new” threats merit the most attention. American administrations have placed the greatest emphasis on so-called rogue states and what President George W. Bush a year ago called the “axis of evil.” Most Europeans have taken a calmer view of the risks posed by these regimes. As a French official once told me, “The problem is ‘failed states,’ not ‘rogue states.’ ”
Why should Americans and Europeans view the same threats differently? Europeans often argue that Americans have an unreasonable demand for “perfect” security, the product of living for centuries shielded behind two oceans.[20] Europeans claim they know what it is like to live with danger, to exist side by side with evil, since they’ve done it for centuries—hence their greater tolerance for such threats as may be posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the ayatollahs’ Iran, or North Korea. Americans, they claim, make far too much of the dangers these regimes pose.
But there is less to this cultural explanation than meets the eye. The United States in its formative decades lived in a state of substantial insecurity, surrounded by hostile European empires on the North American continent, at constant risk of being torn apart by centrifugal forces that were encouraged by threats from without: National insecurity formed the core of George Washington’s Farewell Address. As for the Europeans’ supposed tolerance for insecurity and evil, it can be overstated. For the better part of three centuries, European Catholics and Protestants more often preferred to kill than to tolerate each other; nor have the past two centuries shown all that much mutual tolerance between French and Germans. Some Europeans argue that precisely because Europe has suffered so much, it has a higher tolerance for suffering than America and therefore a higher tolerance for threats. More likely the opposite is true. The memory of the First World War made the British and French publics more fearful of Nazi Germany, not more tolerant, and this attitude contributed significantly to the appeasement strategy of the 1930s.
A better explanation of Europe’s greater tolerance for threats today is its relative weakness. The differing psychologies of power and weakness are easy enough to understand. A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative—hunting the bear armed only with a knife—is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn’t have to? This perfectly normal human psychology has driven a wedge between the United States and Europe. The vast majority of Europeans always believed that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was more tolerable than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, especially after September 11. Both assessments made sense, given the differing perspectives of a powerful America and a weaker Europe. Europeans like to say that Americans are obsessed with fixing problems, but it is generally true that those with a greater capacity to fix problems are more likely to try to fix them than those who have no such capability. Americans could imagine successfully invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, and therefore by the end of 2002 more than 70 percent of Americans favored such action. Not surprisingly, Europeans found the prospect both unimaginable and frightening.
The incapacity to respond to threats leads not only to tolerance. It can also lead to denial. It is normal to try to put out of one’s mind that which one can do nothing about. According to one student of European opinion, even the very focus on “threats” differentiates American policymakers from their European counterparts. Americans, writes Steven Everts, talk about foreign “threats” such as “the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and ‘rogue states.’ ” But Europeans look at “challenges,” such as “ethnic conflict, migration, organized crime, poverty and environmental degradation.” As Everts notes, however, the key difference is less a matter of culture and philosophy than of capability. Europeans “are most worried about issues . . . that have a greater chance of being solved by political engagement and huge sums of money.”[21] In other words, Europeans focus on issues—“challenges”—where European strengths come into play, but not on those “threats” where European weakness makes solutions elusive. If Europe’s strategic culture today places less value on hard power and military strength and more value on such soft-power tools as economics and trade, isn’t it partly because Europe is militarily weak and economically strong? Americans are quicker to acknowledge the existence of threats, even to perceive them where others may not see any, because they can conceive of doing something to meet those threats.
The differing threat perceptions in the United States and Europe are not just matters of psychology, however. They are also grounded in a practical reality that is another product of the disparity of power and the structure of the present international order. For while Iraq and other rogue states have posed a threat to Europe, objectively they have not posed the same level of threat to Europeans as they have to the United States. There is, first of all, the American security guarantee that Europeans enjoy and have enjoyed for si
x decades, ever since the United States took upon itself the burden of maintaining order in far-flung regions of the world—from East Asia to the Middle East—from which European power had largely withdrawn. Europeans have generally believed, whether or not they admit it to themselves, that whenever Iraq or some other rogue nation emerged as a real and present danger, as opposed to merely a potential danger, then the United States would do something about it. If during the Cold War Europe by necessity made a major contribution to its own defense, since the end of the Cold War Europeans have enjoyed an unparalleled measure of “free security” because most of the likely threats emanate from regions outside Europe, where only the United States can project effective force. In a very practical sense—that is, when it comes to actual strategic planning—Iraq, North Korea, Iran, or any other rogue state in the world has not been primarily a European problem. Nor, certainly, is China. Both Europeans and Americans agree that these are primarily American problems.
This is why Saddam Hussein was never perceived to be the threat to Europe that he was to the United States. The logical consequence of the transatlantic disparity of power has been that the task of containing Saddam Hussein always belonged primarily to the United States, not to Europe, and everyone agreed on this[22]—including Saddam, which was why he always considered the United States, not Europe, his principal adversary. In the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and most other regions of the world (including Europe), the United States plays the role of ultimate enforcer. “You are so powerful,” Europeans often say to Americans. “So why do you feel so threatened?” But it is precisely America’s great power and its willingness to assume the responsibility for protecting other nations that make it the primary target, and often the only target. Most Europeans have been understandably content that it should remain so.
A poll of European and American opinion taken in the summer of 2002 nicely revealed this transatlantic gap in perceptions of threat. Although widely reported as showing American and European publics in rough agreement, the results indicated many more Americans than Europeans worried about the threat posed not only by Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but also by China, Russia, the India-Pakistan confrontation, and even the conflict between Israel and the Arab states—on almost all these issues significantly more Americans than Europeans expressed concern.[23] But why should Americans, “protected by two oceans,” be more worried about a conflagration on the Asian subcontinent or in the Middle East or in Russia than the Europeans, who live so much closer? The answer is that Americans know that when international crises erupt, whether in the Taiwan Strait or in Kashmir, they are likely to be the first to become involved. Europeans know this, too. Polls that show Americans worrying more than Europeans about all nature of global security threats and Europeans worrying more about global warming demonstrate that both sets of publics have a remarkably accurate sense of their nations’ very different global roles.
Americans are “cowboys,” Europeans love to say. And there is truth in this. The United States does act as an international sheriff, self-appointed perhaps but widely welcomed nevertheless, trying to enforce some peace and justice in what Americans see as a lawless world where outlaws need to be deterred or destroyed, often through the muzzle of a gun. Europe, by this Wild West analogy, is more like the saloonkeeper. Outlaws shoot sheriffs, not saloonkeepers. In fact, from the saloonkeeper’s point of view, the sheriff trying to impose order by force can sometimes be more threatening than the outlaws, who, at least for the time being, may just want a drink.
When Europeans took to the streets by the millions after September 11, most Americans believed it was out of a sense of shared danger and common interest: The Europeans knew they could be next. But Europeans by and large did not feel that way. Europeans have never really believed they are next. They could be secondary targets—because they are allied with the United States—but they are not the primary target, because they no longer play the imperial role in the Middle East that might have engendered the same antagonism against them as is aimed at the United States. When Europeans wept and waved American flags after September 11, it was out of genuine human sympathy. It was an expression of sorrow and affection for Americans. For better or for worse, European displays of solidarity were a product more of fellow feeling than of careful calculations of self-interest. Europeans’ heartfelt sympathy, unaccompanied by a sense of shared risk and common responsibility, did not draw Europeans and Americans together in strategic partnership. On the contrary, as soon as Americans began looking beyond the immediate task of finding and destroying Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to broader strategic goals in the “war on terrorism,” Europeans recoiled.
Differing perceptions of threats and how to address them are in some ways only the surface manifestation of more fundamental differences in the worldviews of a strong United States and a relatively weaker Europe. It is not just that Europeans and Americans have not shared the same view of what to do about a specific problem such as Iraq. They do not share the same broad view of how the world should be governed, about the role of international institutions and international law, about the proper balance between the use of force and the use of diplomacy in international affairs.
Some of this difference is related to the power gap. Europe’s relative weakness has understandably produced a powerful European interest in building a world where military strength and hard power matter less than economic and soft power, an international order where international law and international institutions matter more than the power of individual nations, where unilateral action by powerful states is forbidden, where all nations regardless of their strength have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behavior. Because they are relatively weak, Europeans have a deep interest in devaluing and eventually eradicating the brutal laws of an anarchic Hobbesian world where power is the ultimate determinant of national security and success.
This is no reproach. It is what weaker powers have wanted from time immemorial. It was what Americans wanted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the brutality of a European system of power politics run by the global giants of France, Britain, and Russia left Americans constantly vulnerable to imperial thrashing. It was what the other small powers of Europe wanted in those years, too, only to be sneered at by Bourbon kings and other powerful monarchs, who spoke instead of raison d’état. The great proponent of international law on the high seas in the eighteenth century was the United States; the great opponent was Britain’s navy, the “mistress of the seas.” In an anarchic world, small powers always fear they will be victims. Great powers, on the other hand, often fear rules that may constrain them more than they do anarchy. In an anarchic world, they rely on their power to provide security and prosperity.
This natural and historic disagreement between the stronger and the weaker manifests itself in today’s transatlantic dispute over the issue of unilateralism. Europeans generally believe their objection to American unilateralism is proof of their greater commitment to principles of world order. And it is true that their commitment to those ideals, although not absolute, is greater than that of most Americans. But Europeans are less willing to acknowledge another truth: that their hostility to unilateralism is also self-interested. Since Europeans lack the capacity to undertake unilateral military actions, either individually or collectively as “Europe,” it is natural that they should oppose allowing others to do what they cannot do themselves. For Europeans, the appeal to multilateralism and international law has a real practical payoff and little cost.
The same cannot be said of the United States. Polls consistently show that Americans support multilateral action in principle. They even support acting under the rubric of the United Nations, which, after all, Americans created. But the fact remains that the United States can act unilaterally and has done so many times with reasonable success. The facile assertion that the United States cannot “go it alone” is more a hopeful platitude than a descrip
tion of reality. Americans certainly prefer to act together with others, and American actions stand a better chance of success if the United States has allies. But if it were literally true that the United States could not act unilaterally, we wouldn’t be having a grand transatlantic debate over American unilateralism. The problem today, if it is a problem, is that the United States can “go it alone,” and it is hardly surprising that the American superpower should wish to preserve its ability to do so. Geopolitical logic dictates that Americans have a less compelling interest than Europeans in upholding multilateralism as a universal principle for governing the behavior of nations. Whether unilateral action is a good or a bad thing, Americans objectively have more to lose from outlawing it than any other power in today’s unipolar world. Indeed, for Americans to share the European perspective on the virtues of multilateralism, they would have to be even more devoted to the ideals and principles of an international legal order than Europeans are. For Europeans, ideals and interests converge in a world governed according to the principle of multilateralism. For Americans, they do not converge as much.
It is also understandable that Europeans should fear American unilateralism and seek to constrain it as best they can through such institutions as the United Nations. Those who cannot act unilaterally themselves naturally want to have a mechanism for controlling those who can. From the European perspective, the United States may be a relatively benign hegemon, but insofar as its actions delay the arrival of a world order more conducive to the safety of weaker powers, it is objectively dangerous. This is one reason why in recent years a principal objective of European foreign policy has become, as one European observer puts it, the “multilateralising” of the United States.[24] It is why Europeans insist that the United States act only with the approval of the UN Security Council. The Security Council is a pale approximation of a genuine multilateral order, for it was designed by the United States to give the five “great powers” of the postwar era an exclusive authority to decide what was and was not legitimate international action. Today the Security Council contains only one “great power,” the United States. But the Security Council is nevertheless the one place where a weaker nation such as France has at least the theoretical power to control American actions, if the United States can be persuaded to come to the Security Council and be bound by its decisions. For Europeans, the UN Security Council is a substitute for the power they lack.